[Sigia-l] What do you call that place between thedatabaseandthe live site?

[Adrian Howard]

On 15 May 2007, at 15:01, Jonathan Baker-Bates wrote:

>> Personally I think that for the vast majority of projects the
>> idea of being able to do all the IA work up front is broken.
>
> With the clients I work with, not all the IA work is done up front,  
> but
> the majority has to be. The agency/client model demands it so I  
> have to
> accept that as a fact of life. I see you are in a different position.

Fortunately as far as I am concerned :-)

> However, what I am proposing would do exactly what you describe in  
> terms
> of its approach at least.
>
>> You need a cultural shift from IA as
>> director of work, to IA as collaborator in work.
>
> But you leave me none the wiser. I still don't understand the  
> connection
> between agile development and being able to manage content so that it
> can inform design (and vice versa). The content is still going to be
> there: loads of it, unkempt, unknown, long, interesting, short,  
> boring,
> irrelevant, useful, duplicated and all the rest.
>
> So, again, how do you manage content (if you manage it at all) within
> the design process?

In smaller chunks, in order of biggest business value first. Find the  
content that gets you the biggest bang for your buck. Organise that.  
Get it out. Repeat.

Do the absolute minimum to get something useful out there and then  
use that as the basis for incremental improvement. Not a prototype in  
the "build it to throw one away" sense, but one that acts as a seed  
that you can grow the rest of your structure around.

Make vague sense?

Cheers,

Adrian